Since 2002, Ahosting, Inc. (ahosting.net) has operated a world-class web hosting operation. This Hudson, Florida-based company supplies a wide variety of services ranging from basic shared hosting to dedicated servers, as well as unique reseller and multiple IP hosting solutions. Ahosting's services are delivered from facilities strewn across North America and Europe.

The Opportunity

Although Ahosting had already long-established a highly successful web hosting operation, we identified that one of the firm's brands, aseohosting.com, was having difficulty keeping up with a high number of competitors that were heavily involved in SEO. This came as no surprise, as high-volume search phrases that contain the word "SEO" generally aren't all that easy to rank. As a more recent deviation from the company's other brands (registered in 2009), ASEOHosting also had a lot of lost time to make up. This presented the greatest challenge for us, as well as the greatest opportunity for the client.

The Solution

Northcutt quickly began organic search engine optimization, AdWords PPC optimization, and content marketing services for ASEOHosting under a six-month agreement, later extended at the client's request. We established social media accounts and a blog, filling each with steady content and optimizing. We also optimized PPC spending and the site itself using Enterprise SEO software and a well-trained eye. Finally, we began drafting and distributing regular search-optimized news releases via major newswires as part of a steady, well-rounded link building campaign.

The Results

ASEOHosting's campaign was monstrously successful. Despite the fact that we were competing almost exclusively with sites owned by those with at least some SEO knowledge, we moved ASEOHosting steadily upwards until each of the most valuable search phrases ranked on page 1. Numbers below compare the start (April, 2011) and end (October, 2011) of our initial six-month agreement unless otherwise noted.

By the end of our initial six-month agreement, the number of leads coming to the site had more than doubled, as reported by Advanced Web Statistics (AWStats).

Conversion data was not available due to our analytics process in 2011 (now done exclusively through Google Analytics). A variety of indications imply that the added trust from of social media, enhanced usability of strong technical SEO, and the reputation management effects of littering the search results with high quality content, did accomplish some higher conversion percentage.

Previous to Northcutt's involvement, there was no notable external content marketing effort underway for the ASEOHosting brand (so there is no comparative data available). The company's Twitter and Facebook accounts did however reach thousands of followers, with steady activity and growing engagement. The blog also received a steady incline in traffic thanks to regular additions of high-quality copy. Finally, the visits referred from external pages metric in AWStats reported gains of +243%.

ASEOHosting's organic search engine optimization campaign with Northcutt is a success story if there ever was one, considering Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Yandex. The following charts plot the gains on six of this industry's most-searched phrases in Google, from near the start of the campaign to the time of this report, when all six phrases had successfully made the journey to page 1.

Note the shifts in October 2011, where Google's Panda 2.5 algorithm update dropped seo host well into the supplemental results (too far down for our analysis software to plot the trend), and the return of this phrase in later months, alongside seo web hosting, seo web host, and multiple ip host. We believe that this was a clear result of subsequent Panda-focused optimizations and a strategically diversified link building campaign (whereby Google began ranking related terms to those that were already highly successful). This also came in addition to clear gains across hundreds of long-tail variations (ie. seo web hosting services company in florida) and targeted leads.

Through backing a high quality product with intelligent marking, Ahosting, Inc. was able to raise their company to new heights in 2011. We have been thrilled to work with Ahosting, as a client that has never underestimated the merits of our SEO process. As of the time this report was compiled (January, 2012), Ahosting continues to see improvements with each month as a client of Northcutt.